thinking about fantasy names again today, specifically how to name The World. it's easy enough to explain a made-up world name in some constructed language as meaning "the world / earth" or a borrowing of some name of a particular land or people from that world (a la Africa and Asia). but i always find myself curious how different planes and planets (rather than certain landmasses or settlements) acquire particular names in fantasy when they're (presumably translated to) English words that mean something distinctly different from just "the world" or "the soil" or "the planet" as it were.
given "Earth" as an example, or the notion that so many names for places and nations around the world can be reduced to "the land" or "the people" etc, why might people call their world, say, Reverie?
one possibility for worlds that exist in some kind of community or contact with other plane(t)s, is that they have acquired certain names explicitly as a way of distinguishing themselves from other worlds, or because such distinction was imposed upon them by some invading power, i.e. The Empire calls its homeworld Earth (in its language) but the planes of its client states / conquered territories are given more complex or etymologically different names, which might particularly make sense if the Empire also imposes its language on its subordinate peoples and seeks to overwrite their names with its own. this could also take the form of a peaceful settlement between nations, and one that might develop without being driven by any particular formal agreement: perhaps it simply comes into vogue for people to name their worlds something etymologically distinct from others, giving rise to the plane of Fairyglen and the plane of Celestial River and Marrowtale and so on.
another possibility is that the world name is simply a deliberate choice made for its poetry. Disco Elysium offers an example: Elysium originates as a "term of endearment" for the wider world during its age of exploration, presumably related to the excitement from new discoveries and territories for conquest.
but maybe it's not quite as simple as "they just call it The World or The Earth" either. what does the word "world" derive from etymologically in other languages anyway? or English itself, for that matter? a glance at wiktionary + etymonline:
- the English word originally meant "age of man";
- the Latin Mundus derives from Greek Kosmos which itself also meant "order" and could refer to anything from armies and governments to fashion (hence "cosmetics").
- ancient Greeks further distinguished the physical world from the human world, which they called the Ecumene, sharing the same root as "economy", oikos, or house.
- دُنْيَا (dunyā), the Arabic for our world, originally means "the lower place" (as in, with respect to heaven);
- Chinese shìjiè 世界 (sekai in Japanese) can be translated as "time and space" or perhaps "the realm of our era" [my own, uneducated interpretation]
- Sanskrit loká लोक, from a root meaning "to shine"
and so on, which still isn't getting into the alternate meanings of various words for "world" which may add further texture natively and in translation. seems there is significant variation and more room for poetry here than one might imagine.
